Comey acknowledged the leak of his own memo to a law professor pal after Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) asked if he ever shared any of the memos he had written about conversations with Trump outside of the Justice Department.

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“My judgment was, I needed to get that out into the public square, and so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter,” Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee. “[I] didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to, because I thought, that might prompt the appointment of the special counsel.”